'Isaac Julien, Playtime' at Fort Mason, San Francisco, USA

PRESENTED BY Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture with the Kramlich Collection and the San Francisco Art Institute

1 December 2017 - 11 February 2018

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) is pleased to announce Playtime, an ambitious exhibition of three recent video installations by award-winning British artist Isaac Julien. Each film installation explores the wide-ranging effects of how information, labor, and capital circulate in global, networked societies.

Occupying three separate galleries on the FMCAC campus, the exhibition presents the U.S. premiere of Julien's seven-screen installation, Playtime (2014), featuring a cast of international film stars, including James Franco, Maggie Cheung, and Mercedes Cabral. KAPITAL (2013), a two-screen companion piece to Playtime, documents the public discussion "Choreographing Capital," which was held at London's Hayward Gallery between the artist, social theorist David Harvey, and an audience of academic luminaries such as Irit Rogoff, Paul Gilroy and the late Stuart Hall,

In addition to Playtime and KAPITAL, a third artwork by Julien will inaugurate the San Francisco Art Institute's newly constructed Gray Box media gallery at FMCAC-Better Life (Ten Thousand Waves) (2010)-the cinematic cut of Julien's monumental installation Ten Thousand Waves, filmed on location in mainland China. All three works have been generously loaned from the Kramlich Collection.

The exhibition will be free and open to the public from December 1, 2017 through February 11, 2018 and accompanied by parallel public talks with the artist, and educational programming at UC Berkeley, SFAI, Mills College, and UC Santa Cruz.

The presentation of these highly acclaimed works by Isaac Julien in San Francisco provides a unique opportunity to engage a wide audience from the Bay Area's diverse local communities and to address salient political, cultural, and social issues that affect us all, but in vastly different ways. Julien's visually stunning, multi-perspectival installations chronicle compelling stories of financiers and migrant laborers, art world players and domestic workers that resonate poignantly with both the prosperity and inequality arising from the innovations of the high-tech economic sector.